Drachma.app
A truly inclusive budgeting app and spending tracker
My wife is a designer (clothing) and I have long felt that her intuition for design can easily translate into the UI space.
She had earlier given me feedback for a short-lived product I had launched and it was amazing.
She was always theoretically interested but after a lot of encouragement (and a healthy dose of fear - what if we lose our jobs due to Coronavirus?) she is finally on board with working together towards having a side-business of our own.
I'm really excited about this because my wife and I both face the same problem, and have been using various hacked-together budgeting solutions in the past so her input as a non-technical person is extremely valuable.
I have been a frustrated user of budgeting apps for quite a few years now.
I have tried to faithfully add every single expense but of course I keep slipping up every now and then!
I don't want to keep entering expenses manually, but I'm not going to give my bank username and password to a 3rd party, even if that 3rd party is a Unicorn!
So I start making up a prototype that will fulfill the needs of myself and my family. It wasn't until I was halfway through that I realized that this could be of value to other people as well. So here we are!
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Awesome! My girlfriend (also a fashion designer!) and I are also working on a project together. It's a great and rewarding couple activity in my opinion.
Hey there how’s it going? Looks like we are in a similar boat. I’m also about to launch a budget and expense tracker so I’d be interested to keep in touch about your journey with this! I think there is plenty of room in this space for both of us that we won’t be really affecting either person and maybe we can share our successes and failures with one another. I read your write up on your app and I feel like ours will probably do different things and I’m just focusing on a mobile app. Although I could probably release a website also I was focusing just on the mobile experience specifically and was going to offer a free Dow load from the App Store with a recurring payment in the app. I should hopefully be launching in the next few weeks but not sure what your time table is like or if you’d like to discuss things at some point.
Ha ha, yes there are already hundreds of budgeting apps so a few more won't make a difference!
My timeline is long, I'm actually going against most of the advice I have read, since I'm not in a hurry. I'm now approaching this not as a "startup founder" but as a carpenter making a chair. I'll take my time and make the best possible chair I can. When I'm done, I'll show it off and if it sells, it sells - otherwise I'll sit on it.
For me, cross-device sync is important, as is automatic importing of transaction data, so I'm focusing on the back-end first. I don't even know how to make mobile apps but I'll cross that bridge when I get there :)
Have you thought of the back-end yet? If bank connectivity is important to you I can give you a few pointers there, and I'm happy to discuss pricing, launch, App Store strategies, marketing etc.
I am just doing a progressive web app with a wrapper around it. Mine is built using Angular. I had to add in some things like HammerJS to get some things working properly with even just basic button clicking running on mobile.
Mine is a kind of simple app, I just plan on adding more features after I get it launched and just trying to do the bare minimum for now. I could keep adding features forever probably but if I do that it will never get out there. I believe taking your time on it to make sure your first revision is done right is important.
Cross device sync is important on mine and was sort of the primary focus on the app. Bank connectivity would be nice, but I have decided not to worry about that on the first release as I'm trying to intentionally keep things as simple as possible, but that's also why I switched to a mobile focus because I had a working prototype and my wife told me it just wasn't usable since I have to manually enter in some data she told me after I made her start using this until its in a native mobile app I'm not interested in using this anymore manually entering data and nobody else will either.
So I actually switched out my entire UI library and redid my entire UI a couple of times to focus on the mobile first experience. It's a pretty simple app, but realized if the user experience was bad on it that it was dead in the water before it even got released.
If I was adding bank connectivity then making it mobile first wouldn't have been a priority most likely. I almost feel ashamed at this point how much time I've spent on it just because when you go to use it I think to myself well it's such a simple app, but my vision for it evolved a little bit as I went and that changed some things.
One of the reasons I decided against the bank connectivity is just because it seemed so complicated so I would definitely love to get some pointers from you on it, for the future. And talking about pricing, launch, etc I'd love to discuss sometime, maybe we could do a phone call.
Just to be clear too, my app does run on the web, but since its optimized for mobile some of the things, like for example the menu system is built for mobile so I'd probably have to change how it looks and functions for a web app or it might look strange. I need to decide if that's important to me for the first release as it will delay the release a little bit.
My wife is also a designer (graphic designer). I just get some feedback from her here or there and I've done most of the design, but hope to get her more involved once I can show her some people are actually using it and there's interest. She's part of the reason I've had to redo some things a couple of times because of the negative feedback I got. Some of it I just ignore due to timelines of how long something will take to change, but other stuff ends up being one of those dang well I never thought of that moments, I have to do that now no matter how long it takes to redo.
I agree on the mobile-first approach and the UX. I'll be happy to jump on a Zoom/Hangouts/Teams call to brainstorm further. Shoot me an email to inamesh AT hotmail DOT com and we'll set it up.
Congrats man! I hope it's the beginning of something great!
Congrats! Recruiting my wife, especially now we are both quarantined, was a great unlock in terms of productivity and happiness!
I no longer need to decide spend my time developing the product or with her, she's an amazing UX designer and also started to open my eyes to nocode.
Best of luck to you both!
That sounds awesome! Her non-tech perspective and creativity will really come in handy. Congrats!
Cool ! Good luck guys.
Thanks! :)